The topic of motivation came up recently with a client. Why ? It’s a big topic; as everyone knows and there have been many experts weighing in on it for years, all so interesting.

Always Go Back To ” Why “

The topic of motivation came up recently with a client. Why? It’s a big topic; as everyone knows and there have been many experts weighing in on it for years, all so interesting.   While I don’t consider myself an “expert” in anything, I do have a lot of experience in working with people and…

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A Daily Dozen to Build Trust with Your Team

I talked with an old friend the other day and we got to reminiscing about a job we worked on together years ago. Because of some badly handled acquisitions where the cultures of the companies were not particularly considered before merging them together, this company had what we called “relationship issues.” When I think about…

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If You’re Not Romancing Your Customers, Who Is?

It’s the time of year when everyone’s thinking about romance. But did you ever think about how much “romance” is involved in building and sustaining customer relationships? I look at the sales and marketing process and it very much resembles the “courtship” we see in our early romantic endeavors. We put our best foot forward,…

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Let It Begin With Me

It’s the first full week of a brand New Year 2013. We greet each other with wishes that the year be “happy and healthy” and of course “prosperous”. Our minds turn to asking questions about how this year might be different than the last. At work we have new goals, new plans, new targets. In…

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Holiday Message 2012

Click here for a pdf version “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  An impassioned plea by Robert Parker, the father of 6 year old Emilie Parker, lost in the shooting in CT last week, asks that…

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This is Our Defining Moment

If you’ve ever been to one of my workshops or executive meetings, you probably remember a demonstration I do to explain how and why emotions are contagious. If you haven’t, here’s a short explanation. Our bodies are electric. Every organ in our body produces electricity. Most of the time we don’t think about it much.…

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Sharing the Wealth

As I move things around trying to find more space in the office, I’m finding a lot of notes that I took at conferences, and a lot of “Keepers”. I’m a note taker. A borderline obsessive note taker. (And while I’m confessing, I must admit, I doodle too.) As I sort through old notes, I’m…

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Positive Leadership explores and adopts the appropriate practices of "Positive Deviation". We search inside and outside a company for pockets of success - for people and places where extraordinary things are happening. We study, we analyze based on what we know about our own culture, we discuss, we experiment, and we stay open to what the new sciences are teaching us.

What Positive Leadership Is, And Isn’t

I meet a lot of new people. And that means that frequently I’m asked what I “do”. It would be wonderful if I could develop and remember an “elevator speech” that really encapsulated it; but faced with that situation in real time, I find myself saying a variety of different things. Most of the time…

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